High school applicants from New York get more time after a technical glitch

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New York City is extending its high school application deadline to Dec. 9 after officials discovered a flaw in a new tool that tells students their admission chances, an Education Department spokesman said Wednesday.

The glitch only affected two schools, but families said it may have had an impact on their placements.

The extension came a few hours before the deadline for applications for the city’s eighth-graders, who rank 12th or higher among the top students in a pool of more than 400 schools.

To add further complexity, the deadline will be extended even further to Jan. 10 for about 1,600 students who officials said may have acted on false information about their chances of attending two popular Manhattan high schools have.

Officials said they would continue to release intake results for all families on March 6 as originally planned.

Education officials this year unveiled the new prediction tool, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to give families a more realistic sense of their chances of getting into a particular school and help them put together more balanced applications. It gives students a “high,” “medium,” or “low” chance based on the school’s selection criteria and competitiveness, as well as the student’s lottery number.

However, according to officials and Citywide Council President Debbie Kross, the program spat out false quotas for families attending two popular Manhattan high schools, Millennium and NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies, based on false information about the number open Places on High Schools, a parent-led school board representing high school families in the five boroughs.

Both schools were among a group of six competing high schools in Manhattan, where officials decided this year to give students who live in the district priority for 75% of seats.

Officials corrected the error on Tuesday evening, but notified about the error via email to around 1,600 families who had either applied to one of the two affected schools or selected one of them as a “favorite” on the online portal MySchools and offered them one Deadline extension until January. 10, according to Kross and an email obtained by Chalkbeat.

Education Department spokeswoman Jenna Lyle called the error an “initial implementation issue” and noted, “Families find the tool helpful.”

“This issue, which only affects a small percentage of students, has been resolved and we apologize for this inconvenience,” she added.

The Education Department decided to extend the deadline for everyone to “ensure all families have enough time to complete their application and have the most accurate information,” officials said.

It was not immediately clear how long the prediction tool had been using incorrect odds for the two high schools or why officials only noticed the error this week. Enrollment officials told Kross they would conduct an audit to make sure the tool wasn’t passing bad information to other schools, she said.

The introduction of the new tool was one of several changes to this year’s admissions process. For the first time this year, students were also able to evaluate an unlimited number of secondary schools, up from the previous 12.

But it’s not the first time technical glitches have clogged last-minute application processes for schools in the city.

Earlier this year, technical problems with the city’s middle school application process delayed the start of the application period, forcing officials to push back the deadline.

Due to technical problems, officials also extended the high school deadline to 2022. But Education Department officials in recent years have committed to streamlining the process and sending admissions results earlier in the year to give families time to plan .

Kross, who helped lead the Department of Education’s development of the prediction tool, thinks it makes sense to give more time only to families who were given incorrect information as a result, in case it affects the schools’ rankings on their application effects.

“The way (the education department) recognized the problem, communicated about it and offered a solution is very fair,” Kross said.

However, other parents felt it was unfair to further extend the deadline for just some families.

“This is incredibly unfair … to selectively give some people more than a month to continue their application process,” said Kim Gabriel, a Brooklyn parent of an eighth-grader who didn’t receive the extension until Jan. 10.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York covering New York public schools. Contact Michael at [email protected].